The Limitless Pendant doesn’t exactly scream “AI.” As Dan Siroker, the CEO of the company behind the new device, lifts it up to show me over Zoom, the round, rubbery-looking gizmo reminds me more of an old-school clippable Fitbit. But what Siroker is actually showing me is a device that can be clipped onto your shirt or worn on a string around your neck that is meant to record everything you hear — and then use AI to help you remember and make sense of it.

The Limitless Pendant is part of the whole Limitless system, which the company is launching today. (Oh, and in case you’re wondering: yes, it’s very much a reference to the movie.) Siroker’s last AI product, Rewind, was an app that ran on your computer and would record your screen and other data in order to help you remember every tab, every song, every meeting, everything you do on your computer. (When the company first teased the Limitless Pendant, it was actually called the Rewind Pendant.) Limitless has similar aims, but instead of just running on your computer, it’s meant to collect data in the cloud and the real world, too, and make it all available to you on any device. Rewind is still around, for the folks who want the all-local, one-computer approach — but Siroker says the cross-platform opportunity is much bigger.

“The core job to be done is initially around meetings,” Siroker tells me. “Preparing you for meetings, transcribing meetings, giving you real-time notes of meetings and summaries of meetings.” For $20 a month, the app will capture audio from your computer’s mic and speakers, and you can also give it access to your email and calendar. With that combination — and ultimately all the other apps you use for work, Siroker says — Limitless can do a lot to help you keep track of conversations. What was that new app someone mentioned in the board meeting? What restaurant did Shannon say we should go to next time? Where did I leave off with Jake when we met two weeks ago? In theory, Limitless can get that data and use AI models to get it back to you anytime you ask.

Siroker and I are talking the day after the first reviews of the Humane AI Pin came out, and he’s careful to differentiate his company’s approach from these all-encompassing AI tools. “We’re trying to do a few things exceptionally well, not be a mile wide and an inch deep,” he says. “We’re not, you know, trying to reinvent the wheel with lasers.” His plan is to integrate into all the apps you use and put Limitless inside of those apps; you should be able to take notes in Notion or get action items in Slack, he thinks, instead of having to go to some other app entirely. “Why would I even have to make you log into my cloud based app, when I could just have you show up to the thing you’re already using?”

But only a few minutes later, Siroker’s ambition gets the best of him, and he starts to imagine a much bigger future for Limitless. (I mean, the thing is called Limitless — there’s no “don’t do too much” faux-humility allowed here.) “You know, of course it’ll do the generic fun facts, Perplexity, OpenAI stuff,” he says. “The next step is proactive, and not reactive. I have access to your email, I have access to your Slack messages — when you get a message for which the context of your past can help answer it, I can just give you that draft.” 

Once Limitless gets that down, he says, it’ll be about AI agents that actually do stuff on your behalf, so Limitless can know everything about you and do everything for you and everything will be amazing.

After a minute of this, Siroker catches himself. “But that’s a much harder problem to solve.” For now, meetings.

On its own, the first version of the Limitless system is not especially unusual. Practically every meeting tool is baking in AI features for extracting key points and action items; transcription apps are a dime a dozen; there’s a whole industry of startups hoping to get a few bucks a month in order to make your meetings a little more efficient. Siroker is confident Limitless can do it well, in part because Rewind has been doing it well for a while, but ultimately meeting AI is probably a feature and not a product.

The Limitless Pendant, which is shipping in August, is what might change things. The $99 device is meant to be with you all the time — Siroker says its battery lasts 100 hours — and uses beam-forming tech to more clearly record the person speaking to you and not the rest of the coffee shop or auditorium. An LED lights up whenever it’s recording, and the Limitless Pendant also has a “Consent Mode” that detects new voices and doesn’t record them until the software hears them agree to being recorded. (It’s worth noting this mode is off by default.) Everything you record gets uploaded to Limitless, mingled with your other data, and made available through the apps. 

When I ask Siroker why it was worth it to build a device to go along with his software, when voice recorders already exist, he says getting good real-world audio is key to being more than just an AI for your Zoom calls. He also once again references the Humane AI Pin — specifically The New York Times’ review of the product, which concludes by saying there’s something cool about the wearable form factor and hopes for a future iteration of the product, “perhaps a cheaper one that lacks a camera and a laser.” That future iteration, Siroker says with a laugh, is basically the Limitless Pendant.

Make no mistake: Limitless absolutely intends to be a big-deal AI gadget, as full-featured and powerful as anything from Meta or Rabbit or Humane. But the plan is to not lead with cool hardware or some sci-fi vision of a still-distant future. It’s to pick a problem AI can solve, solve it, and then pick another one. Meeting prep may not be the most exciting AI story to tell, but it’s one that works. And that’s probably the way to start.